Society and the Internet

Moments in the Development of the Internet

1950s: Early development of computing 1950

for domestic purposes

1955
1962: Doug Englebart began design of
an “oN-Line System” (NLS), demonstrated 1960: J. C. R. Licklider’s call for a global
in 1968 network

1960
1963: Ted Nelson coins the term
“hypertext”

1967: L. G. Roberts publishes his plan

for the ARPANET at DARPA 1965
1969: ARPANET Commissioned by US
Department of Defense for research on
networking; and the first message is sent
1972: ARPANET’s first public over the network
demonstration 1970

1972: e-mail system begins on ARPANET

1973: TCP/IP is developed by Robert Kahn
and Vint Cerf
1975 1981: US National Science Foundation
(NSF) develops the Computer Science
Network (CSN), later NSFNET, expanding
ARPANET

1982: Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) is 1980

standardized
1986: NSFNet created

1989: Tim Berners-Lee and CERN

colleagues invent the World Wide Web;
Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) is formed by 1985 1990: ARPANET decommissioned, ceases
European service providers to exist

1991: World Wide Web service becomes

publicly available on the Internet
1990
1993: Mosaic Web browser developed, 1992: Internet Society is chartered; World
soon commercialized as Netscape Wide Web is released by CERN
Navigator
1994: World Wide Web Consortium
1995: Internet commercialized, Netscape (W3C) founded; NSFNET decommissioned
launched, Amazon.com and eBay are 1995
founded
1998: Google starts as a research project
2001: Tim Berners-Lee and others call for at Stanford University
a new semantic (data) web
2000 2001: Wikipedia is founded by Jimmy
Wales and Larry Sanger.
2001: Original peer-to-peer file-sharing
music site, Napster, is shut down. 2003: Hacktivist group Anonymous is
formed.
2004: Social networking site, Facebook, 2005
is launched
2006: Wikileaks is launched by Julian
2005: YouTube is launched Assange.

2010 2007: One of the first large state-

2007: The iPhone is publicly released, sponsored cyber-attacks is launched on
popularizing mobile applications (apps) Estonia by Russia

2011: Face Recognition and Voice Search 2009: The first block of the Bitcoin chain
commercially available is mined.
2015
2013: Edward Snowden leaks classified 2013: Silk Road, the first modern darknet
information about the global surveillance marketplace, is shut down.
operations being conducted by most
Western powers. 2016: Cambridge Analytica micro-targets
US voters in the presidential election
2017: European Union’s General Data 2020
Protection Directive (GDPR) comes into
2019: The Internet reaches 3.9 billion
force
people, over half (51.2 percent) of the
world’s population.
Society and the Internet
How Networks of Information and
Communication are Changing Our Lives

Second Edition

Edited by
Mark Graham and William H. Dutton

with a foreword by
Manuel Castells

1
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Foreword

Internet: Utopia, Dystopia, and Scholarly Research

The Internet has become the fabric into which our lives are woven. It is
relentlessly changing our communication environment. And communication
is the essence of being humans. It is not “I think, thus I exist,” but “I commu-
nicate, thus I exist”. If I do not communicate, no one knows what I thought
and therefore I exist only in my inner self—which only becomes fully human
when I leave my shell and I venture into the wonders and surprises of life.
Indeed, forms and technologies of communication have differentiated our
societies throughout history. The advent of the Internet has represented a
quantum leap in the transformation of communication. Yet, half a century
after its first deployment (in 1969) the social meaning of this interactive,
multidirectional, global, digital network of communication remains obscured
in the media, in the institutions, and in people’s minds, by the utopias and
dystopias that emerged from the very moment of its inception.
Utopians hailed the Internet as the coming of the kingdom of freedom.
Freedom from the state, and from big corporations.
Dystopians warned against a technology that would bring widespread iso-
lation and alienation to society, as people would be transformed into nerds
mired to their computers day and night, leaving reality and being submerged
into virtuality. Furthermore, Big Brother would use the pervasiveness of the
Internet to construct a digital panopticon and establish a surveillance system
as never before possible.
Both positions were proven right and wrong at the same time.
On the one hand, it is true that unfettered, multimodal, ubiquitous
communication has extraordinarily enhanced the capacity of individuals to
construct the networks of their lives. In so doing, they have largely bypassed
the mass-media control exerted by either governments or media corporations,
creating a space of autonomy that has impacted everything, from business to
social movements, from cultural creativity to the rise of the sharing economy.
However, states have rushed to limit the newly developed free communica-
tion by setting up sophisticated systems of censorship, by blocking access to
websites, by approving and enforcing restrictive legislation, by engaging in
Foreword

cyberwarfare, and by inducing massive disinformation, amplified by armies of

robots that populate digital networks. As for the corporations running these
networks, they have become gigantic oligopolies, and have used their control
of traffic to transform our lives into data, the sources of their profits: data
capitalism is a fundamental industry of the twenty-first-century economy.
Freedom of information is the subject of a decisive fight against the freedom
of producing and propagating “fake news.”
On the other hand, the myth of the alienated Internet user has been
debunked repeatedly by a flurry of studies that have found the obvious: soci-
ability is hybrid (as it always was), made of both face-to-face and technology-
mediated interaction. Of course, there are people alienated and isolated
among users. As they are in the whole of society. In fact, the Internet has
alleviated these feelings, by providing an alternative for people who tend not
to be very sociable. And, yes, a new pattern of sociability has emerged: it is
what we conceptualize as networked individualism. Individualism is the
predominant culture of our societies because of a number of factors that are
not rooted in technology. What the Internet does is to provide an appropri-
ate platform for the full development of this new form of sociability. The
Internet and social media are as sociable as any other forms of mediated
communication: in traditional sociological terms, we moved from commu-
nity to association, and then from association to networking.
Yet, the dystopian view of the Internet finds strong support in the extraor-
dinary rise of government surveillance apparatuses after 2001, exploiting the
emotion and the fear caused by the terrorist attacks on 9/11. As Michael Hayden,
the director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) said at the time,
referring to the difficulty of finding terrorists in a world of ever-growing infor-
mation: “In order to find a needle in a haystack, I need the entire haystack.”
Thus, while most of the alarm about the power of digital Big Brother has
been aimed at the attempt to control Internet communication by China, in
fact the NSA has become the core of the most comprehensive surveillance
system on the planet, particularly through its connection with the sophisti-
cated British intelligence agency, GCHQ, and their counterparts in Germany
and Israel among others. Together they constitute a global bureaucracy of
surveillance, with occasional collaboration with the independent Russian
and Chinese agencies.
However, while surveillance is the domain of the state, the total loss of
privacy is mainly the result of the practice of Internet companies, such as
Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. These companies retrieve
and store data about all of our communications, sometimes with our (forced)
consent (we need their services because they are an oligopoly), and some-
times without it. In principle, they aggregate our data without personal iden-
tifying information, but the advertising we receive relentlessly in our

viii
 Foreword

electronic addresses is customized, and so someone enabled the advertisers

to personalize content for our tastes, preferences, and behavior. However, not
all of this is the fault of the Internet, because a key source of the data is the
digitization of everything, starting with our bank cards, that tells the story of
our life in minute detail. It is the formation of a “digital exhaust” by the
linkage between all our digital traces that provides the basis of this panopticon
resulting largely from the exchange of data between different corporations
and, ultimately, the state itself.
Nonetheless, the digital panopticon is not an overwhelmingly dictatorial
system, because people are still able to communicate in a horizontal manner,
and even to rebel, and mount political challenges, as we have witnessed, par-
ticularly since 2010, in multiple countries around the world. We can say
that a new form of social movement has been born: the networked social
movement, with extraordinary impacts in political processes. But this says
nothing about the ideological orientation of these movements, as extreme
right movements have taken advantage of these autonomous networks, at
least as much as progressive social movements have. Technology does not create
the content of the behavior of the actors in the networks: it amplifies its effect.
Thus, the simplistic debate between utopians and dsytopians blocks our
understanding of the key communication technology of our lives. Because, as
in all technologies in history, in the first stage of their development there is a
reaction of fear of the unknown, particularly among the older generations,
overwhelmed by the proliferation of machines that they ignore. These fears
are deepened by the mass media, because “only bad news is news.” And
because of the potential existential threat to traditional media, from the
press to television, that is posed by social media, traditional media have a
vested interest in delegitimizing social media as a form of reliable information
and communication. And so, our world has entered the Internet Galaxy at full
speed, without awareness of its implications.
Scholarly research, conducted in the usual conditions of intellectual inde-
pendence and rigorous methodology, is the only way to clarify the issues at
stake, as a precondition to designing appropriate polices and legislation that
could eventually restore human control over new, powerful machines, and
people’s autonomy vis-à-vis the proprietary networks of communication.
This is why the field of Internet studies is essential for the construction of
human consciousness in our contemporary context. And this is why this book
that summarizes, updates, and theorizes critical research findings on Internet
and society, is a necessary guide to address key dilemmas of our time.
Manuel Castells
Los Angeles and Barcelona,
March 2019

ix
Preface

As we completed this second edition of Society & The Internet, the Internet had
reached over half of the world’s population. There was surprisingly little
fanfare for such a major milestone. To the contrary, there was concern that
the rate of the Internet’s diffusion was slowing—an inevitable pattern in the
diffusion of all innovations.1 But more alarming was the rise of increasingly
major concerns over the societal implications of the Internet and related
media, information, and communication technologies. Pundits argued that
social media was destroying democracy, big data was undermining our priv-
acy; screens were affecting the health and sociability of children; artificial
intelligence (AI) would kill jobs; states were engaged in “World War Web”;
and the Internet and Web were fragmenting as the balkanization of the global
information system speeded up.2
As Manuel Castells elucidates in the foreword to this book, this is part of an
enduring utopian–dystopian dialogue about the societal implications of the
Internet and related media and communication technologies. However, what
is somewhat different about these debates from past hopes and concerns
about technology is the degree to which they are current rather than future
issues. That is, concerns at a level bordering on panic have emerged around
actual developments, such as revelations about government surveillance,
massive data breaches, and disinformation campaigns.
Has the dystopian narrative been proven right? Alternatively, are such
concerns based on overly simplistic and often deterministic logics that do
not withstand the scrutiny of empirical and theoretically sophisticated ana-
lyses? We hope this book’s collection of research will help you answer such
questions.
This book, as Manuel Castells points out, is an attempt to bring independ-
ent, disinterested, and empirically informed research to bear on key questions.
We want to show the reader how research is being conducted in central

1
This refers to the S-curve of any innovation that describes how the rate of diffusion slows after
it reaches most adopters (Rogers, E. M. (2004). Diffusion of Innovations, fifth edn. London: Simon
and Schuster.).
2
“World War Web” was the cover title of the September/October 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs.
Preface

domains of Internet research: demonstrating a breadth of theoretical and

methodological approaches to developing understanding about the societal
implications of the Internet. Each author was tasked with not just laying
out key disagreements or debates, but also explaining how they interrogate
them. We hope this collection therefore conveys the significance of varying
perspectives on the Internet and brings Internet studies alive for anyone
who seeks to understand the many ways in which the Internet is impacting,
co-constituting, and being impacted by society.
Central to understanding the role of the Internet in society, is to focus on
not just its material, but also its discursive power. Visions of the Internet have
always been a critical driving force behind its development. Ted Nelson, the
person who coined the term “hypertext,” has been a critic of the design of
the Web and many other information technologies. He explained the failure
of so many technical designs by famously saying: “Tekkies have created the
world in their image; I believe today’s computer world is a result of tekkie
misunderstandings of human life and human thought.” Despite spectacular
advances, there remains much room for improvement.
But utopian visions of the Internet live on and continue to be a force driving
individuals, companies, and governments to invest in its potential. As the first
edition of this book was nearing completion, we learned of the death of
Douglas C. Englebart (1925–2013), an engineer and one of the first scholars
to envision a future in which computers and telecommunications would be
networked worldwide in ways that could augment human intelligence. In
1962, over fifty years ago, he started work on the design of what he called an
“oN-Line System” (NLS), which he demonstrated in 1968, one year after his
team invented the “mouse”—a device that has since changed the ways in
which people interact with computers.
He was one of many pioneers who helped shape what we have come to
know as the Internet, the Web, and related digital technologies, ranging from
telecommunications infrastructures to tablets, smartphones, and voice search.
He was inspired by earlier pioneers, such as Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider,
who called for a global system, and in turn inspired others, such as Ted
Nelson, who conceived and developed the concept of “hypertext,” to
describe the nonlinear pathways that can link digital text and images, and
which move away from the model of a linear book.
As we were working on the second edition of this book in 2018, another
Internet pioneer passed away, but one of a very different sort. Not an engineer,
but a poet and essayist, and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead (as well as a
cattle rancher). John Perry Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Founda-
tion, dedicated to protecting digital rights, and in 1996 penned one of the
early Internet’s most utopian visions: “A Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace.” The declaration boldly proclaimed: “Governments of the

xii
 Preface

Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace,
the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave
us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we
gather.” The declaration, in other words, introduced the idea that the Internet
could allow its users to transcend many of the world’s preexisting material
constraints.
Such early visions of what would become the Internet of the twenty-first
century were formed when computing was out of the reach of all but a few
organizations. Englebart’s vision was developed when nearly all computing
was conducted on large mainframe computers that were so expensive and
complex that only large organizations and governments possessed them. In
the sixties, the very idea that households, much less individuals in their
pockets, would have access to a computer networked with billions of other
computers around the world was viewed as folly—completely unrealistic “blue
sky” futurology. Ironically, even Barlow’s ideas of the 1990s were developed
when mobile computing was still a far distant dream for the general public.
And yet today a majority of humanity takes the Internet—often via a mobile
device—for granted as a central feature of and tool in use for everyday life
and work.
Of course, many pioneers followed in the steps of Englebart, Barlow, and
other early visionaries and developed the technologies and visions that have
shaped access to information, people, and services in the twenty-first century.
They include Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, inventors of the protocols that
define the Internet, and Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN, who invented
the World Wide Web. Of course, there are many more—too many to list.
But the most unsung pioneers of the Internet are its users—people like you
who use, view, mediate, edit, make, and therefore profoundly change the ways
that much contemporary knowledge is circulated and recirculated, and com-
munication is enacted and used. This book provides many examples of how
users have shaped—and continue to shape—the development of the Internet
and its application across nearly every sector of society, always coming back to
the key issue of what difference the Internet makes in all aspects of our lives.
Influential pioneers in the design and development of the Internet, like
Doug Englebart, understood the importance of users. As computing moved
from large mainframes to personal computers to the Internet becoming your
computer, it became clear that users were playing a major role in shaping the
Internet in ways many of its designers could not have imagined. For example,
many did not foresee the Internet becoming so widely embedded in core
activities of everyday life, from correspondence to banking and shopping. It
was originally designed to share computing resources in the computer-science
community. In a personal conversation about cybersecurity, one of the key
engineers involved in developing the Internet argued that—to paraphrase

xiii
Preface

him—if he had known how the Internet would develop, he “would not have
designed it as he did.”3 Fortunately, the Internet was designed as it was, which
led to its becoming one of the most transformative technologies of the
twenty-first century.
Likewise, while the Internet was developed originally to support collabor-
ation and sharing among computer scientists, few early developers would
have anticipated the ways in which crowdsourcing—tapping the wisdom of
Internet users distributed across the globe—has enabled users to play more
important roles in science and society in what has been called “citizen sci-
ence.” Who would have envisioned, for instance, that people from all over the
world would edit Wikipedia, averaging about 1.7 edits per second around
the clock?4 However, even with enormous numbers of people being creators
and makers on the Internet, huge inequalities remain in terms of who gets to
have a voice there and what is represented. As new uses evolve, there is a need
for even greater ingenuity and creativity on the part of developers and users
alike to address the problems and risks of the digital age.
In the half-century since Englebart envisioned an NLS, the promise of the
Internet, Web, and related digital information and communication technolo-
gies to truly augment human intelligence has become evident, but so has
the centrality of a global Internet to such valued outcomes as freedom of
expression, privacy, equality, and democratic accountability. The visions
and work of the John Perry Barlows, as well as the Douglas Englebarts, of
this world continue to be needed as much as ever. In fact, most debates over
such central values as freedom of expression in the twenty-first century are
about the Internet.
It is important to recognize that present-day concerns, such as those over
disinformation, are not new. Well before the twenty-first century, many
people considered the potential societal implications of computing and tele-
communications enabled by digital technologies. As early as 1973, computer
scientists such as Kelly Gotlieb began to write about some of the key social
issues of computing, such as the implications for freedom of expression,
privacy, employment, education, and security. Most of these issues remain
critical today. In the early 1970s, Gotlieb and others discussed the idea of an
“information utility”—analogous to other utilities, such as those for electricity
or water. They were well aware of J. C. R. Licklider’s call for a global network,
even though ARPANET—the early incarnation of what would become the
Internet—was only at the demonstration stage at the time they wrote, and
governments were the primary adopters of computing and electronic data-
processing systems. Nevertheless, the issues defined as early as the 1970s

3
David Clarke in a personal conversation with Bill Dutton.
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics/

xiv
 Preface

remain remarkably key to discussions of the Internet, big data, social media,
and mobile Internet, over forty years later.
As the second edition of this book was nearing completion, the world was
only beginning to recover from a moral panic over the rise of fake news, the
fear of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and a declining trust in the Internet
to deliver on its promise. Major changes have occurred across the decades and
even since this book’s first edition. Two are absolutely fundamental in intro-
ducing this edition.
First, the Internet has increasingly been perceived as a serious threat. In the
Internet’s early years, it was an interesting innovation, but viewed as of no
particular importance by many in government, business and industry, and
society. With its continued and rapid diffusion into and out of the dotcom
bubble of 2001, the Internet came to be viewed as a fountain of benign
innovation in democratic governance and everyday life. The Internet, Web,
and social media came to be viewed as the harbingers of worldwide transform-
ation to more distributed, collaborative, governance—the end of hierarchy
and the death of dictators. But within a decade after the millennium, dramatic
events began to challenge positive visions of the Internet’s role. To many,
Wikileaks came to be viewed as a threat to governance, rather than a tool for
accountability. The release of secrets by Edward Snowden fueled visions of
worldwide surveillance rather than distributed intelligence. Social media came
to be viewed as a Trojan Horse to democracies targeted by malevolent and
possibly state-supported actors, a tool for propaganda and misinformation.
Thus, to paraphrase Albert Teich’s summary of perspectives on technology in
general, the Internet has come full circle, from having no particular effect, to
being an unalloyed blessing, to being an unmitigated disaster—all in the
course of a few decades.
Secondly, in contrast to the early years, as we moved into the second decade
of the twenty-first century, the Internet had become an infrastructure of every-
day life and work for much of the world. It is no longer seen as simply a “virtual”
or “cyber”-space beyond the realm of the material world. It is instead an
embedded, augmented layer and infrastructure of contemporary societies. As
such, instead of a Barlow-esque vision of a domain of life in which the old rules
no longer apply, we see ways in which people, organizations, and states with
economic, social, and political power use the Internet to amplify their reach.
The Internet has become so widely diffused and pervasive that we are no
longer simply relegated to debating competing visions of the societal impli-
cations of this technological innovation. We are in a place in which the actual
societal implications of one of the most significant technologies of our life-
times can be seriously studied. In doing so, students of the Internet and
society need not just to stop at understanding the dynamics of our contem-
porary digitally mediated world, but to build on those understandings to

xv
Preface

develop new, fairer, and more just digital utopias. As AI, even bigger data, new
forms of human interaction with computers, and ever-increasing mobility,
enabling access from anywhere to anywhere at any time, change how we
interact with each other, we need to make sure that we always look to not
just where we are heading, but also where we might want to be—on the basis
of normative forecasts. Nascent movements around initiatives like data just-
ice, platform cooperatives, digital unions, and a decolonized Internet are just
some of the ways in which emerging visionaries are trying to forge a better
digital future.
The central mission of this book is to offer a base from which the next
generation of scholarship, policy, and visions can be constructed. It aims to
show you how a multidisciplinary range of scholars seek to empirically and
theoretically understand the social roles of the Internet. It is in this spirit that
this book brings to bear a variety of methodological approaches to the empir-
ical study of the social shaping of the Internet and its implications for society.
Are those developing and using the Internet creating a system that aug-
ments human intelligence, as Englebart envisioned? Will the Internet be
designed and governed to support freedom of information, as Barlow envi-
sioned? Are we using the Internet in ways that undermine social relationships
and the quality and diversity of information resources required for economic,
social, and political development? What difference is the Internet making to
the quality of our lives and how can this role be further enhanced in the future?
What people, places, groups, and institutions have been able to derive the most
benefit from the Internet, and who, what, and where have been left out?
Who gets to control, create, and challenge new flows of information in our
networked lives? And how are those flows of information used to entrench,
amplify, or challenge economic, social, and political power? In the years and
decades to come, the answers to these questions will be driven in part by the
quality of research on the social shaping of the Internet and its implications
for society. We hope this book helps engage you in that enterprise.
For this collection is designed to show how these questions can be
addressed. It presents a stimulating set of readings grounded in theoretical
perspectives and empirical research. It brings together research that examines
some of the most significant cultural, economic, political, and other social
roles of the Internet in the twenty-first century in creative ways. Contributors
and topics were selected to introduce some of the most engaging and ground-
breaking scholarship in the burgeoning multidisciplinary field of Internet
Studies. In this spirit, the chapters are rooted in a variety of disciplines, but all
directly tackle the powerful ways in which the Internet is linked to transform-
ations in contemporary society. We hope this book will be the starting point for
some students, but valuable to anyone with a serious interest in the economic,
social, and political factors shaping the Internet and its impact on society.

xvi
Acknowledgments

This book began as a collaboration across the Oxford Internet Institute (OII),
one of the world’s first multidisciplinary university-based departments of
Internet Studies. Over the years, our collaboration has grown to encompass
a wider range of scholars across the world who are focused on studies of the
Internet and related information and communication technologies.
The founding mission of the OII was to inform and stimulate debate over
the societal implications of the Internet in ways that would shape policy and
practice. As this book engaged more universities and colleagues across the
world, it became a joint endeavor to extend this mission beyond the OII and
engage the growing field of Internet studies more broadly. This broadening of
our contributions was greatly facilitated by Bill Dutton’s directing the Quello
Center at Michigan State University while we were developing this second
edition. Bill has since returned to Oxford, but we wish to thank the Quello
Center for becoming a partner in sharing this mission.
Society and the Internet arose through a lecture series that the editors organ-
ized for the OII as a means to engage undergraduate students at the University
of Oxford.
It was launched with a lecture by Professor Manuel Castells, an OII Distin-
guished Visiting Professor at that time, on the cultures of the Internet. We are
most grateful for his support and his foreword to both editions of this book.
As this series unfolded, we realized that our audience was far broader than
we imagined as the lectures engaged a wide range of students, faculty, and the
general public. From those who attended our lecture series or viewed our
webcasts, it was apparent that there was serious interest in the societal impli-
cations of the Internet. We thank all those who came to these lectures—your
participation led us to edit this collection.
We are particularly grateful to the authors contributing to this second
edition. The success of the first edition led to this new edition, so we also
remain indebted to all of our original contributors. Without the many authors
contributing to these volumes, and their good spirit and enthusiasm in work-
ing with us as editors, this book would not have been possible.
Mark wishes to thank the Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-155), ESRC (ES/
S00081X/1), and the European Research Council (ERC-2013-StG335716-GeoNet)
Acknowledgments

for supporting his work. Bill acknowledges the Quello Center at MSU, Oxford’s
Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity Building (GCSCC), and Google Inc.
for supporting his research and work on this book.
We are also very grateful to several anonymous reviewers, to Barbara Ball for
her brilliant copy-editing, and to Steve Russell for his evocative artwork for the
cover of this and the previous edition. Our editors at Oxford University Press,
including David Musson, Emma Booth, Clare Kennedy, Jenny King, Louise
Larchbourne, project manager Lydia Shinoj, and their many colleagues, were
professional and skilled at every stage of the process of producing this book.
We could not have asked for better support.
Help to bring this book into being came from not just our colleagues and
editors, but also our families. Mark and Bill wish to thank Kat and Diana for
their invaluable support.
Finally, we thank those who read, work with, critique, and build on this work.
Our imagined readers have been the major inspiration for this collection, and
we appreciate your role in making this book a contribution to our field.
The Editors
Oxford
2019

xviii
List of Figures

1.1 Technology adoption trends over time 31

2.1 LOLCats 44
2.2 Success Kid 46
2.3 Using the same meme template to express divergent opinions 51
3.1 The location of academic knowledge 61
3.2 Internet penetration 64
3.3 Archipelago of disconnection 66
3.4 Content indexed in Google Maps 68
3.5 Ratio of Flemish to French content in Google Maps 69
3.6 Ratio of Arabic to Hebrew content in Google Maps 70
3.7 A map of Wikipedia 71
3.8 Articles per capita 72
3.9 Edits to Wikipedia 72
3.10 Share of edits to local content on Wikipedia 73
4.1 Cybercultures on the Internet 87
4.2 Internet cultures and countries 88
7.1 “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” front page 139
7.2 Sexism in casual games: user-contributed capture from FatUglyorSlutty
documenting harassment in Words With Friends 141
7.3 “Go back 2 halo pussy, u r a loser pussy faggot nigger spic jew” 142
9.1 Model of factors shaping end-user cybersecurity problems 171
9.2 Model showing loadings and path values of significant relationships 176
11.1 Signatures to petitions to “block” and “don’t ban” Donald Trump
from UK entry; December 2016 203
11.2 Signatures to the petition to rerun the UK’s EU referendum 203
11.3 Mobilizations against policing in the US, on Facebook and Twitter 204
11.4 Distribution of petition data compared with normal distribution 206
13.1 The purposes of search 236
13.2 The reliability of different sources of information 237
List of Figures

13.3 The multiple sources of information about politics 238

13.4 Online sources of information about politics 239
13.5 Practices tied to confirming a story 240
13.6 Relative prevalence of information practices 242
14.1 Illustrative examples of networks of audience overlap 253
14.2 Matrix and graph representation of audience overlap (May–July 2016) 255
14.3 Audience overlap network before and after thresholding 256
15.1 Digital divides in the Thai silk industry 270
15.2 Pak Thong Chai, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand 273
15.3 Silk shop 274
15.4 Spinning platform 275
18.1 (a) Convergence to equilibrium price, p* and quantity in a competitive
market; (b) the effect on equilibrium price and quantity of a
reduction in scarcity of a commodity; (c) equilibrium price when
subject to a scarcity of attention 309

xxiv
List of Tables

1.1 Home broadband subscribers 36

4.1 Likert Scale items used to identify cultures of the Internet 84
4.2 Percentage of cluster who agree with each dimension 86
4.3 Hierarchical regressions on amount of Internet use 89
4.4 Hierarchical regressions on amount of social-media use 90
5.1 Size of East York older adults’ social networks 103
9.1 Variable information 175
10.1 Three perspectives on big data 186
13.1 Frequency of using a search engine (percents) 235
13.2 The reliability of search engine results (percents) 238
19.1 Reciprocal and generalized sharing: definitions and examples 324
24.1 The more technical work that needs to be done for the future Internet 405
24.2 Social work that needs to be done for the future Internet 405
Notes on Contributors

Maria Bada is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. She received
her doctorate in psychology from Panteion University, Athens. Her dissertation focused
on media psychology and behavioral change.
Grant Blank is the Survey Research Fellow at the OII, University of Oxford. He has
received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Communication, Technology and
Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.
Samantha Bradshaw is a D.Phil. candidate at the OII, University of Oxford, where she
is also a Researcher on the Computational Propaganda Project, and a Senior Fellow at
the Canadian International Council.
David Bray is the Executive Director for the People-Centered Internet coalition, a 2018
Marshall Memorial Fellow to Europe, and an Eisenhower Fellow to Taiwan and Australia.
He is also a member of the Faculty at Singularity University and a 2016–2021 WEF
Young Global Leader.
Antonio A. Casilli is an Associate Professor, Telecommunication College of the Paris
Institute of Technology (Télécom ParisTech). He is a Research Fellow at the School for
Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris) and at the Nexa Center (Poly-
technic University, Turin).
Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and
Society, University of Southern California. Professor Castells was a Distinguished Visit-
ing Professor at the OII, University of Oxford, from 2006 to 2010, and a member of its
Advisory Board.
Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and the co-designer of the Internet. He
has served in executive positions at ICANN, ISOC, MCI, CNRI, ACM, DARPA, and also
serves on the National Science Board.
Sadie Creese is Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science at
the University of Oxford, where she is Director of Oxford’s Cyber Security Centre,
Director of the Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity, and a Co-Director of the
Institute for the Future of Computing, both at the Oxford Martin School.
Matthew David is Associate Professor of Sociology at Durham University. He is author
of Sharing: Crime against Capitalism (2017) and Peer to Peer and the Music Industry (Sage).
Laura DeNardis is an Internet governance scholar and an Associate Professor in the
School of Communication at American University in Washington, DC. She is an
Affiliated Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Notes on Contributors

Martin Dittus is a digital geographer and data scientist at the OII at the University of
Oxford. In his research he applies quantitative methods to analyze and visualize
emerging online practices on a large scale.
Elizabeth Dubois is an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa. She completed
her DPhil (PhD) at the OII, University of Oxford, and was an SSHRC Doctoral Fellow,
Clarendon Fellow, and Killam Fellow (Fulbright Canada).
William H. Dutton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California, a
Senior Fellow at the OII, and Oxford Martin Fellow at the University of Oxford, working
with the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre.
Laleah Fernandez is the Assistant Director of the James H. and Mary B. Quello Center
at Michigan State University, in the Department of Media and Information. Previously,
Dr. Fernandez was an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, in
the Department of Information and Computing Science.
Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Com-
munication at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Associate at the OII,
University of Oxford. She obtained her DPhil in Sociology from the University of
Oxford.
Mark Graham is the Professor of Internet Geography at the OII, an Alan Turing
Institute Faculty Fellow, a Visiting Researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center,
and a Research Associate at the University of Cape Town.
Scott Hale is a Senior Data Scientist and Research Fellow at the OII at Oxford Univer-
sity, and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. At Oxford, he also serves as Director of
the MSc in Social Data Science.
Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use & Society at the Institute of
Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich.
Philip N. Howard is Director and Professor of Internet Studies at the OII and a Fellow of
Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He has courtesy appointments as a professor
at the University of Washington’s Department of Communication and as a fellow at
Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
Peter John is Professor of Public Policy at King’s College London with a focus on how to
involve citizens in public policy. His recent books are Field Experiments in Political Science
and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017) and How Far to Nudge (Edward Elgar, 2018).
Sílvia Majó-Vázquez is a Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism at the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked as a journalist for ten
years. Her research focus is on digital news consumption and audience behavior.
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford,
where she was Director of the Oxford Institute 2011–18, and Programme Director for
Public Policy at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Marina Micheli has been a Project Officer at the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre since July 2018. She wrote her contribution to this volume while she
was a Senior Researcher and Teaching Associate at the Institute of Communication and
Media Research (IKMZ) of the University of Zurich.

xxviii
 Notes on Contributors

Christopher Millard is Professor of Privacy and Information Law at Queen Mary

University of London, where he leads the Cloud Legal Project. He is also a Research
Associate at the OII, University of Oxford, and is Senior Counsel at the law firm
Bristows.
Lisa Nakamura is Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture
and Digital Studies and Director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of
Michigan. She is the author of four books on race, gender, and digital media.
Victoria Nash is Deputy Director and Senior Policy Fellow at the OII at the University
of Oxford.
Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the OII and the
Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She is co-author (with Dawn
Nafus) of Self-Tracking (MIT Press, 2016) and author of Venture Labor (MIT Press, 2012).
Eli Noam has been Professor of Economics and Finance at the Columbia Business
School since 1976 and more recently its Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Business
Responsibility. He has been the Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-
Information, and one of the key advisers to the OII at the University of Oxford, having
served on its Advisory Board since its founding in 2001 through the Institute’s first
decade.
Sanna Ojanperä is a DPhil student at the OII, University of Oxford, and also a doctoral
student at the Alan Turing Institute, where she helps lead the Data and Inequality
Interest Group. Her doctoral research investigates the nature of work conducted
through online platforms.
Julian Posada is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information
and a Junior Fellow of Massey College. Previously, he studied sociology at the School for
Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France.
Anabel Quan-Haase is Professor of Sociology and Information and Media Studies, and
Director of the SocioDigital Media Lab, Western University. She is the coeditor of the
Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (Sage, 2017) and author of Technology and
Society (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Jack Linchuan Qiu is a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he
directs the Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research (C-
Centre). He has written numerous books, including Goodbye iSlave (University of
Illinois Press) and Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press).
Lee Rainie is Director of Internet and Technology research at the Pew Research Center,
Washington DC.
Bianca C. Reisdorf is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research focuses on cross-national studies of
digital inequalities, specifically among marginalized populations.
Ralph Schroeder is Professor at the OII at the University of Oxford and Director of its
Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet. His publications include Rethinking
Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007).

xxix
Notes on Contributors

Limor Shifman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and

Journalism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on the intersec-
tion between digital media and popular culture.
Ruth Shillair , PhD, is an assistant professor in the Media and Information Department
at Michigan State University and a research assistant at MSU’s Quello Center.
Greg Taylor is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the OII, University of
Oxford, where he is also the director of graduate studies. He holds a PhD in economics
from the University of Southampton.
Hua Wang is Associate Professor of Communication at the University at Buffalo, The
State University of New York. She is the editor of Communication and “The Good Life,” on
technology and well-being in contemporary society (Peter Lang, 2015).
Barry Wellman is the Director of the NetLab Network and a Visiting Scholar at Ryerson
University’s Social Media Lab. He’s the co-author of Networked: The New Social Operating
System (MIT Press), as well as the co-author of more than 500 articles.
Renwen Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program
at Northwestern University, where she studies the social implications of digital
technologies.

xxx
Introduction
William H. Dutton and Mark Graham

This chapter provides an introduction to this edited collection for all those
interested in critical social aspects of the Internet and related digital media
and technologies. The chapter explains the significance of multidisciplinary
perspectives on the implications of the Internet in contexts ranging from
everyday life to governance, and provides an overview of how the subsequent
chapters address some of the big questions for study of society and the
Internet.
How is society being shaped by the diffusion and increasing centrality of
Internet use in government, politics, business and industry, and everyday life?
This collection addresses this question through a stimulating set of readings
grounded in theoretical perspectives and empirical research. It brings together
research that examines significant cultural, economic, political, and other
social roles of the Internet in the twenty-first century.
Contributors and topics were selected to introduce students to some of the
most engaging and groundbreaking scholarship in the field. The chapters are
rooted in a variety of disciplines, but all directly tackle the powerful ways in
which the Internet is linked to transformations in contemporary society. This
book will be the starting point for some students, but valuable to anyone with
a serious interest in the economic, social, and political factors shaping the
Internet and its impact on society.
Much has changed since the first edition of this book was published in 2014
(Graham and Dutton, 2014). Over a billion new Internet users have joined
the global network in that time. Nevertheless, nearly half of the world’s
population continues to remain disconnected. Access to information and
communication technologies is considered so important in some parts of the
world (Costa Rica, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, and Spain) that laws
have been adopted limiting the power of the state to unreasonably restrict
Dutton and Graham

an individual’s access. At the same time, numerous countries (such as China,

Egypt, and Cameroon) have been doing the opposite: restricting access to
citizens in recognition of the perceived damage that unfettered access to
information and communication technologies could have on established
social, economic, or political order.
These contrasting reactions are united by a recognition that the Internet
matters more than ever to social, economic, and political life. For many people
and organizations, day-to-day life and work without the Internet are unthink-
able. Yet the Internet, the Web, and social media are relatively recent innov-
ations, as illustrated by the frontispiece to this book. It was impossible to use
Google, Baidu, or Wikipedia in order to look up information until the turn of
the century. Most people couldn’t use social media to connect with friends
until later in the first decade of the 2000s. And it was only in the second
decade of the millennium that a sense of ubiquitous connectivity became
possible owing to the ready availability of smartphones. If the next two
decades of Internet time are as transformative as the previous two, it is likely
that many of us will be living in a very different technologically, information-
ally, and algorithmically mediated world.
In this future, there will be an increased need for critical and sustained
inquiry into questions about the interrelationships of the Internet and
society. To echo Kranzberg’s (1986) First Law of Technology, the Internet
is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. It makes some futures more viable
than others, and provides affordances to help some groups more than others
in struggles for resources and power. Thus, in recognition of the social,
economic, and political transformations wrought on the Internet, through
the Internet, and by the Internet, this second edition of Society & the Internet
brings together leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines in order
to think through how the Internet and society are co-developing and
co-transforming.
As you introduce yourself to this book, you might find it useful to consider
some significant questions related to access, communication, and control over
the digital domain.

• How do you create, get, use, and distribute digital information? The
Internet allows many people to access a world of knowledge (compared
to, for instance, working at a library). However, even the wealth of con-
tent on the Internet has its own biases. Information is partial, and the
algorithms that mediate our access to, and use of it necessarily mediate
some choices over others. The Internet, and the data and media that it
mediates, therefore shape how we move around cities, how we access
news, how we interact with our friends, and how the economy is organ-
ized. Who controls what you see and don’t see? How much do you know

2
 Introduction

about the agendas of the people, organizations, algorithms, and machines

that filter your informational diet?
• How does the Internet help introduce you to new people, as well as
helping you keep in touch with old friends and associates? Are social
media platforms bringing you together with friends or making it more
challenging to connect with different friends in different spaces? Use of
the Internet shapes who you know as well as how you communicate. How
do the designs of the platforms that afford all of this communication
shape what you do, where you go, and how you interact?
• How do you obtain services, from banking and shopping to entertain-
ment, games, and public services? What is your money supporting, and
how much do you know about the products and people enrolled in your
digital economic transactions? Are concerns over security online chan-
ging what you do online and how you do it?
• What technologies link you to the Internet, from wired and wireless
infrastructures to devices you carry with you or wear? This will not only
shape what technologies you require, but also what knowhow you require
to live and work in a world of digital media, and communication and
information technologies?
• How is the Internet changing your workplace and your ability to get a job?
Is the fact that many more jobs can be outsourced through the Internet
impacting your profession? And what strategies can enhance the effect-
iveness of distributed collaboration, but also how are groups of workers
able to collectively engage in them to prevent a race to the bottom in
wages and working conditions?

Just as importantly, think of how people use the Internet to get information
about you, to communicate with you, to provide you with services, and
perhaps even to observe your Internet-mediated behavior. The Internet is
shaping access to you, just as you employ the Internet to shape access to the
world (Dutton, 1999: 4–17). Has the Internet made you feel more isolated, or
more connected? More private, or more public? Empowered, or more
dependent on and controlled by others?

Reconfiguring Access and the Societal Implications

of the Internet

This book seeks to bring to life some of the basic ways in which digital media
and technologies reconfigure your access to the world, and the world’s access
to you. Moreover, the chapters show how these shifting patterns of access

3
Dutton and Graham

translate into outcomes of significance to politics, governance, work, and the

quality of your life and the lives of people and communities across the globe.
For nearly half a century, academics, pundits, and policymakers have specu-
lated on the coming societal implications of the widespread diffusion of
computing and telecommunications, which we have come to identify with
the Internet and related digital communication and information technolo-
gies. Computer and social scientists alike have raised social issues of comput-
ing from the 1960s into the present day (Gotlieb and Borodin, 1973). Early
experiments with computer-based communication and conferencing systems,
such as by Starr Roxanne Hiltz (Hiltz and Turoff, 1978), and Sara Kiesler and
her colleagues (Kiesler et al., 1984) began to raise key social psychological
issues of computer-mediated communication in the 1970s. Broad theoretical
perspectives on the societal implications of the information age were provided
by Daniel Bell’s (1973) concept of a post-industrial “information society,” Fred
Williams’ (1982) “communications revolution,” and later by Manuel Castells’
(1996) trilogy focused on the “network society” and his later work on “com-
munication power” (2009). These are only a few of many scholars who have
speculated about the social implications of the convergence of computing and
telecommunications that has since networked people through the Internet,
World Wide Web, and a growing number of devices, from smartphones to
wearable computing and the Internet of Things (Lanier 2013).
However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become
increasingly possible to move beyond speculation and to study the actual
implications of the Internet across a wide range of social, economic, and
political contexts of use (Katz and Rice, 2002; Howard and Jones, 2004;
Lievrouw, 2011; Nichols, 2017). Instead of anchoring research on early trials
of emerging technologies, researchers can study the factors that are presently
shaping the development and use of the wide range of technologies that form
the Internet, how they are used, and with what effect in everyday life and
work, in the creation and consumption of a wide range of cultural products, in
politics and government, and in business and industries, as well as in science
and the wider economy (Wellman and Haythornwaite, 2002; Hunsinger et al.,
2010; and Rainie and Wellman, 2011). It is also possible to look back at the
history of the technologies that define this new infrastructure of society, and
the policies and regulations that have shaped its development and use
(DeNardis, 2013; Hazlett, 2017).
Business and industry, governments, and academia will continue to specu-
late on the future of the Internet, since the range of innovations that define it
will continue to fuel discussion of where the technology is headed. Topics
such as artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, machine learning, the gig
economy, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data, for example, are emerging
developments that have spawned much speculation about their eventual

4
 Introduction

uses and implications (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014; Carr, 2015). Early
trials and experiments will remain important. However, increasingly,
researchers and students can draw from studies over years of actual use
across many social contexts to make more empirically informed judgments
about the societal implications of these technologies. The Internet has been
shaping societies around the world, with over four billion people connected,
and will continue to do so with billions likely to come online in the near
future (Graham et al., 2018).
In short, the technology and the research communities concerned with the
Internet are in a position never before possible to address how information
and social networks are changing our lives. This book draws from theoretically
informed analyses and empirical research to address this issue across many
technologies, in many social and cultural contexts across the globe, within
major arenas of use and application, and from issues of everyday life to those
concerning public policy and regulation.

Don’t Take the Internet for Granted

If you are in a college or university then you are likely to take the Internet for
granted as a normal part of life from the living room to the classroom and
workplace. In fact, you may find it difficult to escape using the Internet in a
wide variety of areas, particularly as a student, such as when preparing an
assignment for a course. However, as illustrated by a selected chronological
timeline of Internet innovation, the history of this technology has been one
of continuing rapid innovation that is likely to continue well into the coming
decades (frontispiece). Get used to this change. What you know as the Internet
is likely to be transformed dramatically in the course of your lifetime.
As of 2018, more than four billion out of the world’s 7.6 billion people were
using the Internet, leaving about half of the world without access. Are those
without access disadvantaged? You might think for a moment that they will
be free from the hassles of responding to messages and updating their profiles
or being overloaded with advertising, and confused by disinformation. On
further reflection, you are likely to conclude that those without access to the
tools and skills required to access the Internet are truly disadvantaged in a
variety of ways—often unable to effectively compete in many arenas of a
digitally networked world, from completing homework to getting a job and
accessing healthcare.
At the turn of the century—around the year 2000, the Internet was only
emerging from what was called the dotcom bubble, named after the flop of
the commercial (dotcom) rush to exploit the Web, which led to many new
companies losing huge amounts of money in a very short time (Smith, 2012).

5
Dutton and Graham

The Internet had emerged from the academic realm to enter the world stage,
only to crash after the dotcom bubble burst. This led many commentators and
even social scientists to view the Internet as a fad that would soon fade away
(Wyatt et al., 2002). Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and author of Silicon Snake
Oil (1995), is famously quoted in a 1995 interview as saying that the Internet
was simply

. . . not that important.1

But as the significance of the Internet became widely recognized, and

people, businesses, governments, organizations, machines, computers, plants,
animals, databases, and networks have become networked, others have won-
dered if we can any longer discern the difference it makes in our lives. It no
longer makes sense to think of connectivity as simply affording access to some
sort of “online world” or virtual community (Graham, 2013). But as the
Internet is becoming more inseparably integrated into our lives, can we still
unravel its implications? Could social scientists and other Internet researchers
inform us about the actual implications of the Internet and also be more
prescient about the future? We know that contemporary debates continue to
surround the future of the Internet, but can multidisciplinary research that
engages the social sciences inform our views of the future of this information
and communication infrastructure and its role in societies across the globe?
In the next twenty years, many new and many enduring issues will arise
around the future of the Internet. Will it fade away as new information and
communication technologies (ICTs) are invented and put to use? Alterna-
tively, will the Internet—defined broadly as a network of networks—become
even more pervasive and more critical to everyday life and work? There are
almost eight billion people on the planet in 2018, but the designs of digital
industries for a network of sensors—an Internet of Things—anticipate net-
works with many billions if not nearly a trillion “things” like sensors and
actuators. With the Internet of people and things generating mountains of
data from searches, postings, messages, likes, and just moving through life,
governments and corporations are hoping to harness these big data sources to
learn more about our behavior, attitudes, and values—for better or worse?
Questions such as these about the present, past, and future illustrate the
importance of understanding the role of the Internet in society, and how
society is in turn shaping the Internet. That is why study of the Internet is
increasing rapidly and has become a more central aspect of the curriculum of
courses about communication, information, politics, and society (Dutton,
2013; Ess and Dutton, 2013; Peng et al., 2013).

1
A transcript of the interview is available at http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2012/02/the_
Internet_futurist_who_thou/(accessed on August 16, 2013).

6
 Introduction

Lessons Learned for Study of the Internet

There are a number of important lessons that have been learned from decades
of research on the societal implications of communication and information
technologies—increasingly subsumed under broadening conceptions of an
expanding Internet. The chapters in this book avoid the common faults
identified by these issues, but they are valuable to keep in mind as you
critically assess the contributions to research in this field.

Moving Beyond Conventional Perspectives on Technology and Society

Journalistic and much public debate about technology in general, and the
Internet more specifically, revolve around three almost classic positions that
remain true to this day: they are perspectives on technology as an “unalloyed
blessing,” or an “unmitigated curse,” or “not worthy of special notice”
(Mesthene, 1969). These utopian, dystopian, and dismissive views seldom, if
ever, survive careful empirical scrutiny. Of course, they are basic cultural
responses to the idea of technology that are real and infect everyday discus-
sions and public policy, but they often fail to hold up to careful observation
about the actual implications of technologies in real social settings—the
implications are seldom so simple. It is necessary to move beyond such
extreme generalizations and define exactly what expectations are tied to
particular theoretical and critical perspectives on any given technology.

Challenging Taken-for-Granted Assumptions about Technology

Discussion of the Internet and related digital technologies, such as social
media, is filled with taken-for-granted assumptions. Will the Internet lead to
social isolation? Will it undermine higher-quality information, and replace
experts with amateurs (Nichols, 2017)? Will it democratize nations or be a
technology of control and surveillance (Wu, 2016)? Will it lead to new and
rewarding jobs, or deskilling and an erosion in job quality coming from the
pitting of workers from around the world against one another? Such conven-
tional wisdom can often be a guide to answering important questions, but it
should be challenged rather than taken for granted (Keen, 2015).
When you hear people that you know talking about the impact of digital
technologies, you will find it of value to look closely at what these accounts
claim and imply. What do they assume about the role of technologies in
causing these impacts? What evidence do they provide, or what evidence
might illuminate the actual implications of particular technologies in the spe-
cific social settings being discussed, ranging from households to boardrooms?

7
Dutton and Graham

Throughout this book you will see excellent examples of how research can
challenge expectations about the role of the Internet in society.

The Flaws of Deterministic Thinking about “Impacts”: Social-Shaping

Perspectives
Traditional perspectives on technology, whether utopian or dystopian, and
conventional wisdom often embody technologically or socially deterministic
logics. Technological determinism—at its extreme—maintains that a given
technology is on a predetermined trajectory toward the one particular best
way of doing something, and that this one best way will have a rationally
predictable set of social consequences. For example, because the Internet can
support more horizontally networked communication rather than only
reinforce more traditional hierarchical systems of communication, it has
been viewed as a “technology of freedom” (de Sola Pool, 1983). However,
the very design of the Internet is a matter of national and international debate,
for instance when governments want intermediaries like service providers to
exercise greater control over certain “choke points” to resurrect more hier-
archical controls over content, even as far as having a so-called “kill-switch.”
In addition, the ways in which technologies evolve are seldom well-described
along a single path, but more often through multiple paths where selections
are made based on non-technical criteria, such as the momentum behind
previous choices. Furthermore, how we experience something like freedom
is shaped not only by the technology, but also by such factors as where we
access that technology, how we access it, and the sociocultural contexts and
places from which we access the Internet (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). As such,
the impacts are never as straightforward as deterministic thinking would have
us believe.
The idea that technologies, and their uses, are on an inevitable path of
development and that their impacts are predictable—easily extrapolated
from features designed into the technology—has been challenged so often
that social scientists rarely use the term “impact,” for fear of being branded
technological determinists. At the opposite extreme are the social determinists
who dismiss the technology as not having any impact at all since people
design and respond to technologies in such open and flexible ways. As some
of the leading sociologists challenging technological perspectives have
argued, it is equally flawed to move into a position in which the roles of
technology are not considered seriously (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985).
All technologies—the Internet included—are socio-technical systems in
that they are designed by people and in turn shape social choices and behav-
ior. As technologies are accepted, for example, they do contribute to defining
the best way to do something, such as moving people away from pen and

8
 Introduction

paper. Technological change will make some activities more difficult than
before, or other activities easier to do. Think of how the speed bump in a
street can regulate the speed of a car (Latour, 1999), or social media, and how it
can make it easier to communicate with some people, and more difficult to
communicate with others (for instance, if they have no access to the Internet,
or simply refuse to use social media). Myriad examples of the biases of differ-
ent communication and information technologies can be called up to illus-
trate that technologies do indeed matter.

Anchoring Research in Social and Institutional Contexts

In order to move beyond overly simplistic perspectives, and challenge taken-
for-granted assumptions from multidisciplinary perspectives, it is critical that
research is focused on particular aspects of the Internet, such as using search or
social media in specific social and institutional settings. You can see that the
role of the Internet in a household is altogether different from its role in a
government. A household or government department in the US is likely to be
significantly different than in China. As the Internet potentially affects every-
thing, enabling so many different activities in so many contexts, the field
requires ways to arrive at some cumulative set of overarching themes and
conclusions. Some have approached this through metatheoretical perspec-
tives, such as Manuel Castells’ (1996) concept of the “network society” that
could be extended to many social and institutional contexts. This book will
not embrace any single theoretical approach, but bring a set of scholars
together who are addressing key questions across a range of fields. By focusing
on a number of big questions for Internet studies within and across many
different contexts of use, we seek to convey the excitement and open-ended
nature of this emerging field.

The Value of Multidisciplinary Perspectives

One lesson that the editors have sought to follow in compiling this volume is
that study of the Internet requires a multidisciplinary perspective. Much
disciplinary research seeks to develop and refine a particular theoretical per-
spective. In contrast, most research within Internet studies is focused on a
problem, such as understanding the role of the Internet in a particular social
context. Put simply, the most important issues tied to the Internet cannot be
addressed from any single theoretical or disciplinary perspective. Take online
voting as one example. Research on Internet voting would need to draw
from political science, but would also need to understand the security issues
that could undermine its credibility, so computer scientists and security
researchers would have a critical input as well. Problem-driven research is

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Dutton and Graham

inherently multidisciplinary, and this is the case for most issues facing the
role of the Internet in society.

The Big Questions Driving Internet Studies

The questions driving study of the societal implications of the Internet are
wide-ranging, but a few of the big questions can provide a sense of the issues
at stake.

Power and Influence

A core issue of technical change since the advent of computing centers on
shifts of power (Castells, 2009). Will the Internet and related digital media
empower or disempower particular individuals and groups (Benkler, 2006;
Stallman, 2015)? Whether as consumers or audiences in the household, as
workers or bosses, as readers and producers of news, or as citizens and as
activists, a promise surrounding the Internet has been to empower users to
have more choice and influence vis-à-vis intermediaries, news organizations,
governments, and business (Tufekci, 2017). Others maintain that the net-
worked nature of contemporary economies means that large governments
and corporations will have ever more ways of managing citizens, exploiting
workers, and undermining their collective power. Workers can find them-
selves competing against people from around the world for jobs and beholden
to “platform” companies that do not even recognize them as employees
(Srnicek, 2016). This has led to some scholars not just questioning who profits
and should profit from the labor produced by users and workers, but envision-
ing alternatives such as so-called “platform cooperatives” (Scholz, 2016). This
issue of power and influence has local as well as global dimensions, instanced
in issues such as whether readers can hold local news organizations and
politicians more accountable, and also whether the Internet empowers West-
ern sources of news and cultural productions—the old information order—or
amplifies new sources of content production, for example in low-income
countries, that find a more global audience in a new world information order.

Equality and Divides

Will the Internet contribute to an exacerbation or a reduction of socioeco-
nomic inequalities? (Unwin, 2017; Heeks, 2018) The fact that just about half
of the world has access to the Internet makes it even more apparent that the
other half does not. How are non-users distributed across countries, cities,
classes, races, and genders? Are digital divides possible to bridge, or will new

10
 Introduction

technologies continue to exacerbate the inequalities between those who are

connected and those who are disconnected? We need to understand what a
lack of connectivity means for those who aren’t connected. Does it mean
absence from networks of knowledge, a lack of access to the right nodes in
global production chains, an inability to connect with potential employers,
and barriers to communication with friends and family? Related to these
issues, does the Internet, as well as the associated technological infrastructures
of use, impose particular norms, values, and ideals that are drawn from and are
thus more conducive to usage in particular socioeconomic contexts and places
(Kleine, 2013)? Will the Internet reduce or amplify any of the core issues about
inequalities of access, participation, and voice that we are able to observe in
almost every place and community on our planet?

Quality and Diversity

Is the Internet undermining the quality or diversity of information crucial to
democratic societies? Before advances in search, for example, the Web was
frequently referred to as a giant garbage dump of information. Bloggers have
been castigated as rank, unknowledgeable amateurs, undermining the voices
of experts (Keen, 2007; Nichols, 2017). Wikipedia articles and OpenStreetMap
edits have been ridiculed for biases and inaccuracies, with untruths and
misinformation potentially spreading with astonishing speed and scope
through social media. However, others have viewed the Internet as a new
source of information that can complement existing sources and help ensure
greater accountability (Brin, 1998; Dutton, 2009; Schmidt and Cohen, 2013).
It can do this both by questioning and critically discussing information
sources, and by exposing potential untruths and inaccuracies to the gaze of
hundreds or thousands of users through what has been dubbed “the wisdom
of the crowd” (Surowiecki, 2004), even enabling new forms of scientific
research (Dutton and Jeffreys, 2010; Nielsen, 2012). Beyond quality, critics
have argued that the Internet and social media will cocoon users in echo
chambers and filter bubbles that simply reinforce their beliefs and attitudes
(Sunstein, 2017; Pariser, 2012; Graham and Zook, 2013), and become a tool
for politicians and advertisers (Turow, 2011), while others see the Internet as a
means of enabling people to find new and more diverse sources of information
(Schmidt and Cohen, 2013; Halavais, 2018; Dutton et al., Chapter 13, this
volume).

Hierarchies and Networks

Another theme tied to all social and institutional contexts is the potential for
the Internet to undermine hierarchies that are supported by one-to-many

11
Dutton and Graham

networks of communication and information access (Barabási, 2003). The

Internet can easily support more diverse one-to-one, many-to-one, and
many-to-many networks of communication and information access. This is
one idea behind the concept of a network society being ushered in by the
digital age (Castells, 1996). However, others would counter that digital media
is being used to shore up hierarchies and support the continuity of traditional
political and economic power structures (Howard, 2010; Morozov, 2011;
Fuchs and Dyer-Witheford, 2013). In the production of information and
cultural artifacts, for example, the Internet is said to be undermining trad-
itional distinctions between producers and users (former viewers and audi-
ences) (Castells, 2009).
Are audiences being empowered, or are traditional centers of the production
of information becoming even more powerful and global (Lanier, 2013)? How
key is the role of users in becoming new sources of content, from posting
comments to news stories to participating in collaborative citizen science
projects (Nielsen, 2012)? In politics, are networks powerful structures that
can move in more agile ways than hierarchies, or are they unable to take
decisive action? Is the Internet advantaging networked groups and political
movements, for instance in support of collective action (Castells, 2012;
Tufekci, 2017)? Are businesses and economies able to benefit from the same
transformative forces, such as by bypassing intermediaries and creating more
direct value chains between producers and consumers, and reconfiguring the
workplace to become a more distributed virtual organization (Huws, 2003)?
And how do groups of workers identify and undertake appropriate networked
strategies in order to improve their lives and livelihoods (Wood et al., 2018).

Identity and Community

When you can participate in local and global networks of communication, it
is important to ask what exactly an identity is—how do you portray yourself
across multiple digital and disconnected contexts (Castells, 2009, 2010)?
Identity construction undoubtedly becomes more important as you codify
various facets of yourself, such as your personal and work lives, and present
them in different networks. Here it is important to ask questions not only
about online versus offline identities, but rather about the ways in which
identity is variably presented and enacted through a range of digital, net-
worked, and disconnected forms and mediums. Similarly, it is important to
focus ever more inquiry into the digitally augmented nature of our villages,
towns, and cities (Graham et al., 2013), such as when a village, a monument,
a shop, or an event is represented and defined digitally. As the Internet
increasingly evolves from being a digital network that we log into, toward
being an assemblage of data and infrastructures that permeates all aspects of

12
 Introduction

everyday life, we need to ask what those changes mean for the ways that urban
environments and communities are governed, planned, lived in, and chal-
lenged (Miller, 2007). Are we building smart cities or social deserts of our
localities (S. Graham, 2004)?

Freedom of Expression and Connection

The media have long been subject to concerns over freedom of expression,
most often expressed around freedom of the press, as enshrined in the First
Amendment to the US Constitution, but also in many other national,
regional, and global documents (Dutton et al., 2011). Increasingly, as more
of our everyday life and work is conducted over the Internet, concerns over
freedom of expression and other basic human rights are becoming issues
around Internet policy and regulation. Examples include whether nations,
Internet Service Providers (ISPs), organizations, or households should filter
content on the Internet in order to protect children and various cultural,
ethical, or religious sensibilities (Nash, 2013), and whether and how this is
practiced (Deibert et al., 2010)? Should users be disconnected if they violate
laws and regulations governing copyright or decency? What penalties are
proportionate to the offense? How should we study, critique, and challenge
opaque and proprietary filtering and ranking systems that increasingly shape
what is visible (and invisible) on the Internet? Will the Internet be a technol-
ogy of freedom, enabling more freedom of expression, or will it enable gov-
ernments, corporations, and regulators to block content, and disconnect
users, in ways that can have a chilling effect on freedom of expression and
connection (Zheng, 2008; Dutton et al., 2011)?

Privacy and Security

Similar battles rage over privacy and security issues on the Internet. Most
people support efforts to ensure their privacy—their right to be left alone
and for personal information about them not to be disclosed without their
permission (Dutta et al., 2011). Yet, people have long been willing to sacrifice
their personal privacy in some circumstances, such as for public safety, health,
or even convenience (Dutton and Meadow, 1987). Are people more trusting
in providing personal information to companies in the digital age, or is the
protection of privacy becoming more complicated and less manageable by
individuals? Many worry about big data, social media, and the data traces left
by users pursuing everyday practices, such as search, and how they might
enable companies and governments to tap into the personal information of
Internet users in ways that violate key privacy and data-protection principles
(O’Hara and Shadbolt, 2008; Turow, 2011). Can privacy be protected in ways

13
Dutton and Graham

that enable Internet service providers to have sustainable business models,

such as through advertising? Must privacy and anonymity be sacrificed to
protect people from cyberbullies, trolls, or fraudsters? How will governments
balance concerns over privacy against other key concerns, such as national
security, and the enforcement of intellectual property rights and other law
and policy?

The Social Shaping of Technology

The “social shaping of technology” has been a broad approach to science and
technology studies since the 1980s (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985). The
perspective takes the details of technology like the Internet as a focus of social
inquiry. Technologies do not just spring into being, but are invented,
designed, implemented, and used by people in particular social contexts. It
is because these technologies matter that it is valuable to understand why they
emerge and are designed and used in particular ways. Technologies are not on
an inevitable path toward a one best design, as time and again less technically
optimal designs often win out. Understanding the technical, economic, pol-
itical, gendered, geographical, and other social factors shaping technologies
can help foster better designs, more effective patterns of implementation and
use, and more equitable and fair outcomes. While the focus of this volume is
on the social implications of the Internet, it is taken as a given throughout this
collection that technological innovation is a key focus of inquiry in all of the
areas studied. The last section of the book moves this into a more central
focus. What factors are shaping the futures of the Internet and its use across
multiple contexts?

Internet Governance
Likewise, the development of technologies and its social implications are
dramatically shaped by policy and regulations (DeNardis, 2013; Cowhey and
Aronson, 2017; Hazlett, 2017). The very success of the Internet is in part due to
many governments making an effort to encourage technological innovation
through investment in computing and telecommunications, as well as by not
regulating early innovations in computer-based telecommunications and
computing. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, governments
around the world are debating whether and how to best govern the Internet
in the face of issues around child protection, disinformation, cybercrime, and
national security, in addition to politically charged turf struggles over who
governs the Internet.
While the outcome of these debates and policy initiatives around the world
are uncertain, it is very clear that policy and governance issues will be

14
 Introduction

increasingly important to the future of the Internet and its societal implica-
tions. To put it in the starkest terms, the continued vitality, if not very
existence, of a global infrastructure for media, information, and communica-
tion services is at stake, making it critical to govern the Internet in ways that
preserve its documented value to global communication while managing to
grapple with many issues of safety, security, privacy, and freedom of expres-
sion that hang in the balance. Who governs the Internet? Who should govern
the Internet?
Changes in policy and governance of the Internet are almost certain to
follow from global controversies around who governs it. Therefore, it is
important to study empirical relationships and anchor debate in what people
actually do through, and on, the Internet, how the Internet and the sites that
it contains are themselves designed, governed, and produced, and the social
effects of technical designs that pervade our increasingly Internet-mediated
world. But it is simultaneously crucial to keep a clear view of future develop-
ments in technology and policy that together can reshape the societal impli-
cations of the Internet, such as turning a potential technology of freedom into
a tool of surveillance, or segmenting a global digital network into a set of
national and regionally isolated domains.

Uncertain Futures
The future for each of these issues across all of the contexts we have discussed
seems uncertain in light of the unpredictability of technology, policy, and
users in the coming years and decades. The fact that we are in a position to
study the actual role of the Internet in multiple contexts does not mean that
the Internet and its use and impacts will stand still. Quite to the contrary:
there are major developments around the Internet, such as big data, the gig
economy, and artificial intelligence, and more, that could reconfigure many of
the ways we get information, communicate with people, navigate through our
cities, organize activities, and obtain services in the future (Carr, 2015; Lanier,
2013; Wu, 2016). For these reasons, it is critical that multidisciplinary research
study the social shaping of technologies of the Internet, the factors shaping
Internet governance and policy, and the relationships between technical
change, patterns of use, and Internet governance.

Outline of this Book

This book is divided into five parts: (I) The Internet and Everyday Life; (II) Digital
Rights, Human Rights; (III) Networked Ideas, Politics, and Governance; (IV) Networked
Businesses, Industries, and Economies; and (V) Technological and Regulatory Histories

15
Dutton and Graham

and Futures. Each one of these parts focuses on particular contexts of use and
impacts, but also remains closely interrelated to the other parts.
While each chapter can be read on its own terms, we have sought to
organize the book in a way that will help readers gain a broad understanding
of the range of issues and the ways they have been approached in research.
The chapters of Part I provide a foundation for the remainder of the book
by focusing on how the Internet is perceived and used across a wide variety
of individual users, dealing with the Internet in everyday life. A key focus of
this section centers on inequalities arising from differential access to the
attitudes, skills, and related technologies of the Internet. Lee Rainie and
Barry Wellman (Chapter 1) offer an introduction to how people use the
Internet (and to what effect) by describing results of Internet surveys. They
then offer a theoretical concept of “networked individualism” to help syn-
thesize their findings—one that counters conventional wisdom about how
the Internet isolates individuals.
Communication on the Internet is distinctly different from traditional
forms of mass communication in being more malleable and capable of flowing
via one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many networks. It
also has generated some unique communication practices. Limor Shifman
(Chapter 2) introduces one of the more captivating aspects of digital commu-
nication in describing and explaining the role of Internet memes and how
they convey values and meaning in efficient ways that are open to multiple
uses and interpretations. In the next contribution, from Mark Graham, Sanna
Ojanperä, and Martin Dittus (Chapter 3), the authors address one of the major
myths about the Internet. Far from erasing geography by enabling anyone to
communicate with anyone from anywhere, their research illuminates import-
ant material manifestations of the Internet. They argue that the geographical
distribution of information resources shapes both what we know and the ways
that we are able to enact, produce, and reproduce social, economic, and
political processes and practices—a central theme of this book.
The next three chapters of Part I illuminate some of the major ways in which
use of the Internet varies across cultures of the Internet, and by age groups,
and users with different levels of skill in Internet use. Bianca Reisdorf, Grant
Blank, and William Dutton (Chapter 4) show that an analysis of individual
differences in beliefs and attitudes toward the Internet can be used to identify
distinct cultures of Internet users, which helps explain patterns of use and
impact, such as why some people choose not to use the Internet. Seniors are
often identified as distinctly different from youth in their attitudes toward and
use of the Internet. Anabel Quan-Haase, Renwen Zhang, Barry Wellman, and
Hua Wang (Chapter 5) look at older adults in Canada to empirically challenge
some of the stereotypes about this group of (non)users. Age and attitudes are
often intertwined with individual differences in the skills that Internet users

16
 Introduction

possess. Eszter Hargittai and Maria Micheli (Chapter 6) describe the many
aspects of skills relevant to Internet use, and explain how skills matter in
shaping the use of this technology. They show that in contrast to prevailing
stereotypes, young people are far from universally knowledgeable about digi-
tal tools and media.
Part II builds on those discussions of inequalities in access to, and use of, the
Internet to focus on Internet rights and human rights. Freedom of expression
is widely accepted across the world as a fundamental human right. Lisa
Nakamura (Chapter 7) argues that instead of allowing a “post-racial” society
to be brought into being, online games raise serious questions about the
exercise of free expression owing to offensive racist and sexist comments.
Nakamura notes efforts to moderate such expression, and leaves us with
questions about what can be done and what can be tolerated.
Privacy, the right to protect your personal information, such as health
records, from being disclosed without your permission, is another well-
recognized human right that individuals, business and industry, and govern-
ments try to protect on the Internet. As data moves from a personal computer
to the cloud to reside in server farms around the world, can law and policy
protect it from unauthorized use? A legal scholar, Christopher Millard
(Chapter 8), looks at law and policy in the European Union to show how
one set of governments and regulators is seeking to protect data in the clouds.
His discussion is particularly important given the influence that the European
Commission’s directives are having across the world.
Security is closely related to privacy, as it concerns the ability of a person,
household, or organization to prevent unauthorized access, whether into a
home or a computer. The Internet was originally designed to make the
sharing of computer resources easy, so that computer scientists at one uni-
versity, for example, could use a computer at another university. Those who
designed the Internet did not necessarily foresee how the Internet would be
ubiquitous and central for everyday life, for example in shopping and bank-
ing, where preventing unauthorized access is extremely important. Major
initiatives across the world are aimed at helping governments, business, and
industry to have greater capacity to secure data and other computer resources.
These efforts, called “cybersecurity capacity-building,” are described by Sadie
Creese, Ruth Shillair, Maria Bada, and William Dutton (Chapter 9), who
provide evidence that these initiatives can help ensure that Internet users
face fewer problems.
Basic human rights—freedom of expression, privacy, and security—are con-
nected with the degree of autonomy and agency of connected individuals. Is
the Internet empowering individuals or undermining control by individuals
as governments and industry gain more information and knowledge to man-
age the individual consumer or citizen (Stallman, 2015)? One case in point

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Dutton and Graham

concerns large organizations that are increasingly using “big data” in order to
develop attitudinal or behavioral insights. This is done through data aggre-
gated from search, social media, and mobile phone use. Ralph Schroeder
(Chapter 10) looks at contrasting theoretical perspectives on the social impli-
cations of big data, comparing Marxists who argue that big data can be
exploitative to advocates of a “free market” who believe that data-driven
capitalism will lead to more growth. Schroeder instead introduces a Weberian
point of view and argues that big data needs neither to be seen as unquestion-
ably positive nor to be seen as inherently exploitative.
Part III moves to the study of ideas, politics, and governance in a digitally
networked world. The idea that the Internet supports more horizontal and
interactive networks rather than simply top-down hierarchies within organ-
izations and governments has led to visions of the Internet democratizing
government and politics, for instance through enhancing the responsiveness
of politicians to their constituencies. Social and political researchers have
sought to develop theoretical and empirical perspectives on the actual impli-
cations of Internet use in a multitude of areas, from political movements and
elections to political accountability in government and everyday life. Helen
Margetts, Scott Hale, and Peter John (Chapter 11) have focused on how the
Internet is enabling small political acts, as simple as liking a candidate, to
potentially mushroom into major social movements, and the political turbu-
lence resulting from such impacts. Their work expands traditional concep-
tions of political participation and shows how significant small political acts
can be to understanding politics in the digital age.
After the US presidential election of 2016, and the UK’s referendum on
membership of the European Union, optimistic views of the Internet as
enhancing democracy shifted to near panic over the potential for social
media and the Internet to sow disinformation. The next three chapters
address complementary aspects of this concern over disinformation. Philip
Howard and Samantha Bradshaw (Chapter 12) focus on the rise of what they
call “computational propaganda” (software used to automatically generate
messages on social media in an effort to support a political candidate or
issue), and Internet bots. The authors then discuss the responsibilities of
users and platforms to protect the digital public sphere. A related fear is that
the personalization of search tools, and the tendency for people to read
material that confirms their pre-existing biases, will make the general public
particularly susceptible to being caught in Internet filter bubbles and echo
chambers. William Dutton, Bianca Reisdorf, Grant Blank, Elizabeth Dubois,
and Laleah Fernandez (Chapter 13) draw from a survey of Internet users in
seven nations to argue that these fears are wildly exaggerated. This focus on
filter bubbles and echo chambers is built on by Silvia Majó-Vázquez and
Sandra González-Bailón (Chapter 14), who designed a novel approach to

18
 Introduction

tracking news consumption to explore the degree of fragmentation evidenced

in the patterns of access to the news they uncover.
In Part IV, the book shifts to the role of the Internet in business, industries,
and economics, generally finding patterns that challenge some of the more
transformative expectations that have been linked to the Internet. Mark
Graham (Chapter 15) uses a case study of the Thai silk industry to provide a
critical look at the potential of the Internet to empower producers at the
margins of the global economy. Instead of disintermediating production
networks in ways that might benefit village-level producers, he finds a new
group of intermediaries becoming the primary beneficiaries of Internet-
mediated value chains (Graham, 2018). The promises of the Internet to con-
nect users and service providers are also a common theme in the context of
healthcare. Gina Neff (Chapter 16) describes some of the key promises and
expectations surrounding digital health, and raises some of the issues that
arise from the inequities in access to these technologies and services. Equity
concerns regarding personal data lead Neff to be wary of seeing digital health
as a “silver bullet.”
Internet platforms are increasingly mediating much of the world’s digital
economy. Antonio Casilli and Julian Posada (Chapter 17) offer a critical per-
spective on the platforms as digital intermediaries. They show how platforms
standardize and fragment labor processes, and create value from the work of
users. How individuals spend their time on the Internet is a focus for Greg
Taylor (Chapter 18), who argues that the attention of individual users is one of
the new, scarce resources of the digital age. He shows how economic theory
can be applied to understanding the scarcity of attention for thinking about
the business models underlying Internet-mediated information and services.
Digital platforms have also disrupted traditional practices in the ways they
encourage users to share digital content, such as music, even benefit those
users. Matthew David (Chapter 19) makes a strong case for what he calls a
sharing economy that is enabled by the Internet. Sharing, from David’s per-
spective, presents a serious alternative to traditional market-based mechan-
isms for a number of areas, but it is clear that such a shift would be disruptive
of traditional practices.
Part V concludes the volume by turning to the technologies and regulatory
processes that are likely to shape the future of the Internet. Chapters in this
section focus on different factors driving Internet use, governance, and regu-
lation, from national policy initiatives, such as those common in China, to
concerns over children’s use, technical advances, and the rise of global Inter-
net companies.
The first contribution, by Jack Linchuan Qiu (Chapter 20), provides a his-
torical perspective on the regulation and governance of the Internet in China.
Across three phases of Internet governance in the country, the Internet has

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Dutton and Graham

become a major infrastructure of China’s growing consumer-oriented society.

The model of the Chinese Internet should be of interest to anybody seeking to
understand how the Internet might further balkanize from the American-led
global Internet of the past.
Some of the first regulations of digital content were driven by efforts to
protect children, and this motive continues to drive policy and regulatory
developments. Victoria Nash (Chapter 21) has been involved in ongoing
debates over children and the Internet and provides insights concerning the
role of children in the politics of Internet policy and practice. In so doing she
demonstrates how children have presented one of the most politically
charged topics of Internet debate, and she questions whether a risk-focused
public debate best serves their interests.
And technology continues to advance in ways that raise new issues for users,
regulators, and policy-makers. Eli Noam (Chapter 22) looks at the history and
potential futures of media consumption and distribution as video consump-
tion moves away from linear television to new patterns of viewing. Noam
raises questions about whether changes in viewing patterns could be as dra-
matic in the coming years as were changes wrought by the rise of television
over seventy years ago. He sees major implications, not only for entertain-
ment, but for education, politics, and other consumer and public-oriented
uses of video in the next generation of television.
This potential for technical change to have implications for policy and
practice is a central theme of Laura DeNardis (Chapter 23), who develops the
significance of technical designs in shaping the governance of the Internet.
Most people focused on Internet governance are looking at policy processes,
but technical decisions, such as those made in a standard setting, can also
have profound implications for issues such as privacy and freedom of expres-
sion. Increasingly, private Internet platforms are being pressed to regulate the
Internet and social media. DeNardis uses this chapter to identify some of the
issues raised by this privatization of regulation.
The final chapter of this reader is authored by one of the pioneers of the
Internet and his colleague at Google’s People Centered Internet. Vint Cerf and
David Bray (Chapter 24) are well aware of the degree to which the Internet has
been developing over the decades, but know that much work remains to be
done. It is fitting that they tackle in this last chapter some of the “unfinished
work of the Internet.”
We hope this book provides a starting point for those interested in under-
standing some of the key interactions, overlaps, and collisions of the Internet
and society. It provides an overview of some of the key questions in Internet
Studies, and introduces readers to a diversity of data, methods, and
approaches employed to answer them. You will see that much of this work
opens up many new questions as it seeks to address others. The Internet and

20
 Introduction

the practices that it mediates are constantly evolving, and constantly being
reproduced in novel, contingent, and unanticipated ways. As such, Internet
research needs to learn from the past, ground itself in a diversity of disciplin-
ary perspectives, and look to the future. In doing so, it can address core
questions about equality, voice, knowledge, participation, and power. It can
ask what the ever-changing configurations of technology and society mean
for our everyday lives. Armed with such an understanding, it is possible to
address the major issues of policy and practice facing societies around the
world as we seek to harness the potential of the Internet, and avoid the risks
that remain very real for our networked digital information age. Visions of a
hopeful, fair, and just digital future require a diversity of sound theoretical and
methodological approaches in Internet research to get us there.

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1

The Internet in Daily Life

The Turn to Networked Individualism

Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

No other information and communication technology in history has

spread at the pace of the Internet. Data from the Pew Research Center
and NetLab, focused on the North America, shows how the spread of
digital technology has reshaped the flow of daily life, vastly expanded
the personal and information boundaries of users, and transformed the
way people take care of their health, learn new things, and act as citizens.
While change continues, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman discern general
social trends, including a large shift from small, tight-knit, locally rooted
social groups to larger, more loosely knit, and geographically expanded
personal networks, which they call “networked individualism.” This chap-
ter provides an introduction into how digital innovations over the past
generation have been adopted by users and how the utility of these tools is
reshaping the ways people spend their time, enlighten themselves, and
carry on in their daily lives.

The expansion of super-connectivity and the unprecedented rise in the

production and use of digital information have transformed a host of
human and organizational arrangements. This chapter concentrates on
how these technologies spread through the population and describes how
all this connectivity has created new kinds of social interactions and social
differences. These are sometimes called “digital divides” and they affect how
people function in economic and social environments in modern knowledge
economies (Tsetsi and Rains, 2017; Quan-Haase, Williams, Kicevski, Elueze,
and Wellman, 2018).